Steve Reich. Resonances of an Origin Carmen Pardo Salgado
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Steve Reich. Resonances of an origin Carmen Pardo Salgado An origin can be a beginning, a motive or a cause of what happens afterwards, but in geometry it is also the point of intersection of the axis. If we are to begin at the beginning, it has to be said that Steve Reich is considered one of the most influential musicians of the international music scene. Born in 1936 in New York, in the bosom of a European family of Jewish origin, he started studying piano as a boy, and then turned to study percussion. In 1957 he graduated with a B.A. in Philosophy at Cornell University, New York, though he was already set on becoming a musician by then. In 1964 he takes part in the premiere of In C, by Terry Riley, a piece set within the framework of the origins of minimalist repetitive music. This experience leads him to work with short melodic motifs and it strengthens his decision to establish a regular rhythm in music, at a moment when both the serial music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio or Pierre Boulez, and the indecision in music practised by John Cage, were alien to this need. It’s Gonna Rain, his first work on tape, created a year later, represented his official joining the minimalist repetitive school of music, which also takes in musicians such as Philip Glass. In this piece, Reich uses a technique which he had discovered by accident: the progressive moving out of phase. The piece is based on a fragment from a sermon about the end of the world, given by a young street-preacher. Reich recorded it on two tape recorders, together with the sounds of traffic and the pigeons which were there. It centres on the phrase “it’s gonna rain”, intending to establish a relation between “It’s gonna” on one of the tapes, and “rain” on the other tape. Although both tapes start off in unison at the beginning, one of them then carries on a bit faster than the other, thereby creating a moving out of phase, where the rhythmic interval between first and second is varying, and constantly changing. The result is a gradual process, similar to the canon used in western music since medieval times. He has continued to use this technique in pieces such as Come Out (1966), Piano Phase (1967), or Druming (1971). This last one, composed for percussion, female voices, whistles and piccolo, stems from his studies of African percussion at the Institute for African Studies at the University of Ghana, in Accra. Two years later, he studies Balinese Gamelan Semar Pegulingan and Gamelan Gambang in California. If we add to all this his knowledge of the history of western music and his early studies of composition with jazzman Hall Overton, we come up with a musician who can easily become a point of intersection of the axis forming the different cultures. Shortly afterwards he composed Music for 18 Musicians (1974-76), based on a cycle of eleven chords, where harmony and orchestration get to play an essential role. With this he leaves aside the notion of music conceived as a gradual process. While moving away from minimalism as presented in his first works, the musician decides to examine his Jewish roots. According to himself, he had been educated very superficially in Judaism. He had neither studied Hebrew nor the Torah, nor did he know the traditional hymns. His Bar Mitzvah was held, in his own words, in “playback”, since he showed Hebrew words which he did not understand, but which he could recite by heart because he learnt them from a transcription into the English alphabet. After that, reading Martin Buber during his adolescence represented the only link to Judaism1. Bent on discovering origins which the integration into the new country had all but erased from his family, between 1975 and 1977 he studies the traditional forms of biblical cantillation in New York and Jerusalem. He discovers that the biblical chants –which stem from the Hebrew syntax -, are expressed graphically through a system of special marks, the te’amin, or accents, which indicate the syntactic scansion of the phrase. The te’amin do not indicate pitches of sound, which allows much freedom for establishing the melody. Therefore, each Hebrew community has produced different models of cantillation, although always respecting these accents. The study of cantillations will put their marks on compositions such as Eight Lines (1979) or Tehillim (1981), and this investigation into his origins will characterize pieces such as Different Trains (1988) and The Cave (1990-1993). However, just as it had also happened when studying African percussion or the gamelan, it was not a question of applying the sounds of music of other cultures to his compositions, but to be able to think along the lines of that music in order to widen the comprehension of the rhythmic structure of his pieces. Therefore, his goal now is to understand the structure of the cantillations and to apply this to his compositions, and not simply to compose music that sounds Jewish2. From a musical point of view, the search for his origins opens a route whose dimensions point to a dialogue of the musical, spiritual, social and political. Tehillim Tehillim for vocals and orchestra is usually considered the most conventional piece. In it, Reich puts music to psalms of his choice, respecting –for the first time- the meaning of what is said, without submitting the words to superposing. It is not based on short motives repeating themselves, as in his first works, but on a melody conceived in the traditional sense. The voice becomes embodied in the word and does not limit itself to the use of onomatopoeias imitating an instrument in order to become a part of the group of instruments, as in Drumming, where the female voices imitate the sound of marimbas. Here, the music is at the service of the meaning of the words. Reich chooses psalms rather than some fragment from the Book of the Prophets, or the Torah, because the oral tradition of singing the psalms in the synagogue has become lost among western Jews, so this gives him more freedom for his composition. Furthermore, the psalms are considered the most musical texts of Judaism. Written by King David, who had also been a musician, they were sung by the Levites, the tribe which Reich reckons he is descended from. The composer chooses the psalms 19, 34, 18 and 150. The alternation of these four psalms lends the piece -divided into four movements-, its structure. The choice of the psalms is such that they can be sung by anyone, Jew or non-Jew. As the composer himself explains in an interview to Rebecca Y. Kim, his criteria is universality, to be able to look someone in the eyes and recite these psalms3. Different Trains With Different Trains and The Cave, Reich works again with documentary material: recorded voices juxtaposed with the sounds of the place where they are recorded. The composition of the pieces is based on the sonorous documents and, in the second case, also on audiovisual ones. Even though they may include one or several themes, they do not tell a story, or leave the sense of the words intact, as in Tehillim. In Different trains two parallel journeys meet: his own travelling by train between New York and Los Angeles from 1939 till 1942 to visit his divorced parents, and the journeys of the European Jews, who during those same years travelled on the death trains. The piece consists of three parts: The United States before the War; Europe during the War; and the last one, called “After the War”. In the first part, Reich records his nanny and the engine driver of the train line he used to take. For the second part he uses the recorded testimonies of three survivors of the Nazi genocide, which he found at the Holocaust archive in Yale; and the third part combines the voices of the former two. To these voices the sounds of American and European trains of the 30’s and 40’s are added. The piece ends in the way of a tale, evoking a girl who sang for the Germans: ““and when she stopped singing they said, ‘More, more’, and they applauded”. His return to his origins starting from his own biographic experience is mixed with the destiny of the Jews in years which again will mark their history. Finally, the amalgam of both sonorous documents expresses, on one hand, the importance of the origins, but at the same time it shows that these origins can also be relative, as becomes evident with the composer himself, a north-American Jewish boy but not practising. In this piece, just as in Tehillim, the particular starting point –his interest in his origins-, opens up towards the universal, in this case the recent history of a part of the Jewish people. For the composition of the piece, Reich chooses short fragments of the interviews with a distinct melodic outline, which he transcribes into musical notes for string instruments. Thus, as a general rule, whenever it is a woman speaking, she is dubbed by the viola; when it is a man, by the violoncello, and the whistle of the train are dubbed by violins. This way, the voices create the instrumental material, in a process inverse to the one used in pieces such as Drumming or Music for 18 musicians. The Cave With The Cave the questioning of his origins reaches its culminating point.